She was the wife of Luca Vance — the man who had been my closest friend in the world since before either of us could drive.

The three of us had gone to school together.

Luca became a pharmacist and built a small chain of three pharmacies across the Minneapolis metro.

I became a surgeon.

Jessi spent most of her life running a modest family business her parents had left her.

For four decades we had orbited one another through birthdays and Christmas dinners and ordinary Tuesday scotches, the way old friends do, and Luca had stood beside me as the best man at my wedding, and I had believed, as completely as I have ever believed anything, that I knew these two people to the bottom.

At four in the morning, Jessi was finally stable.